too.’
‘How do you know?’
‘By the prints,’ Patterson said. ‘It works like a dog’s paw. Big hand, big man. At least most of the time.’ He glanced down at the prints. ‘And these were real big. Maybe the biggest I’ve ever seen.’
Ben continued to look at the prints. Wide gray whorls spiraled upward from the black negative and finally formed a rounded nub at the apex of each finger.
‘He’s not exactly a giant,’ Patterson said, ‘but I wouldn’t want to bet my house that I could beat him arm- wrestling.’ His eyes darkened. ‘And I guess that’s why she was torn up so. You know, in her privates.’
Ben returned the prints to the envelope.
‘And we found this, too,’ Patterson added. He handed him a rectangular microscope slide. ‘Some kind of sticky stuff was on the ring. I’m having it tested tomorrow.’
Ben took the slide carefully between his thumb and index finger. He could make out a granular yellowish powder which had been smeared across the glass. ‘What do you think it is, Leon?’ he asked.
Patterson shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Could be something like pine pollen. There’s plenty of that around in the summer.’ He smiled. It could be that yellow stuff that sticks to your fingers after you eat a bag of Korn Kurls.’ He shrugged again, this time more helplessly. ‘In other words, it could be just about anything.’
Ben handed back the slide. ‘Well, let me know what you find out.’ He looked into the adjoining room. He could see the plain wooden box where the girl now lay, the little blue dress covering the thick black stitching which he knew ran in an upside-down Y formation from her throat to head to her abdomen.
‘What do you want to name her, Ben?’ Patterson asked suddenly.
‘Name her?’
‘For the record, I mean,’ Patterson said. ‘Unless you want me to just use a number. Plenty of times that’s what I do.’
‘No,’ Ben said. ‘A name.’
Patterson sat down at his desk, picked up a pencil and held it poised an inch or so above a sheet of white paper. ‘Well, what’ll it be? Give me a name.’
Ben looked at him wonderingly. ‘Me?’
‘Why not,’ Patterson said offhandedly. ‘Hell, Ben, you’re as close to being her daddy as anybody else right now.’
For a moment he allowed a list of names to flow featurelessly through his mind. He thought of movie-star names, then those of the colored singers he’d heard of. Nothing seemed to fit the way he wanted it to, but he finally called her ‘Martha,’ after his own mother.
‘Okay,’ Patterson said, as he wrote it down. ‘And what about a last name?’
He glanced back toward the small wooden box, then returned his eyes to Patterson. ‘Give her mine,’ he said.
A large middle-aged white man walked into Patterson’s office a few minutes later. He was followed by two young blacks, both of whom were dressed in the uniforms of the city jail.
‘I’ve come to pick up a body,’ the white man said. He squinted hard at Ben and Patterson. ‘Who do I see about that?’
‘Me,’ Patterson said immediately. ‘Where’s Kelly?’
‘Kelly who?’
‘Kelly Ryan from the Property Department,’ Patterson told him. ‘He usually does the colored burying.’
The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ he said. ‘I work with the Highway Department. I just got a call to pick up a couple of hands from the jail and then come on over here for a body.’
‘You know where the cemetery is?’
‘They got a place dug for it in Gracehill,’ the man said.
‘They give you a plot number?’ Patterson asked.
The man shook his head. ‘They didn’t say nothing but come over to Hillman and pick up a body.’
‘Okay,’ Patterson said wearily. He led the three men into the freezer room and stood beside the coffin. ‘This is it.’
‘A kid?’ the white man asked.
‘That’s right,’ Patterson told him. ‘And it’s a murder, too, so I want you to remember where you put her. Find a tree or a stump or something and remember where it is. I’ll get a plot number later.’
Ben stepped up beside the two young men. ‘I’ll go, too,’ he said.
The white man nodded quickly. ‘Well, with the four of us, we can do it the right way,’ he said, ‘one shoulder at each corner, just like they’d do it in church.’
The four of them took their positions, one at each corner of the coffin, and lifted it up onto their shoulders.
As he headed out toward the parking lot, Ben could feel the body shift slightly as they juggled the coffin awkwardly, and he could imagine the girl’s face jerking left and right inside, as if looking for a way out of the darkness.
A dusty, mud-spattered pickup truck sat waiting for them in the parking lot, its battered front fenders sloping wearily toward the ground. The white man took down the tailgate with one hand while continuing to balance his corner of the coffin precariously on his shoulder.
‘Okay, just set it down real slow,’ he said, after he’d undone the gate. Then he turned cautiously and eased the coffin down onto the bed of the truck.
‘All right, let’s just shove it in now,’ he said. ‘But soft-like. We got a little child here.’
When the coffin was in place, the two black youths hauled themselves into the back of the truck and sat silently on either side of it, their hands resting motionlessly on the top of the coffin.
Ben and the other man crawled into the cab of the truck.
‘Name’s Thompson,’ the man said as he started the engine. ‘Lamar Thompson.’
‘Ben Well man.’
Thompson eased the truck forward, moving slowly toward the avenue and then out into it.
‘You some kind of preacher or something?’ he asked when he brought the truck to a halt at the first traffic signal.
‘No,’ Ben said, ‘I’m with the Police Department.’
Thompson smiled. ‘I figured you might be coming along to say a few words over the body. I thought maybe the state provided something like that.’
‘No.’
‘Want me to do it then?’ Thompson asked immediately.
‘If you want to,’ Ben said indifferently.
‘You got any idea what this child was?’
‘She was a Negro,’ Ben told him.
‘I figured that,’ Thompson said. ‘They don’t bury white people in Gracehill. But what about her religion?’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘Well, I’m a Primitive Baptist, myself,’ Thompson said. ‘You know, an old foot-washing Baptist, what you might say.’ He smiled softly. ‘With us, it don’t matter what this child was, because in the end, she was, what you might say, a child of God.’ He pulled a red handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his neck vigorously. ‘So what I mean is, well, I could say a few simple things over her, if that’s all right with you.’
‘It’s all right with me,’ Ben said. He kept his eyes straight ahead, peering out into the deepening night as the truck moved shakily alongside Kelly Ingram Park and then on ahead into the Negro district. To his right, a string of poolhalls stretched out for nearly a block. A soft green light glowed behind their painted windows, and he could imagine the people inside, lined up along the wall in small wooden chairs or bunched over the tables, their bright, gleaming eyes following the flight of the balls.
‘How long you been a policeman?’ Thompson asked after a while.
Ben drew in a deep breath. ‘Long time.’
‘I’ve worked with the Highway Department for a long time, too,’ Thompson said cheerfully. ‘It’s rough in the summer. You spread that steaming black tar all over everything. It steams right up in your face. You blow your nose when you get home from work, it looks like you’re blowing coal soot out of your head.’
